I brought this book because I'd read the Prince and liked it. However, having read authors who have a better grasp of the Ancient world than Machiavelli has drawbacks. Machiavelli often resorts to crude or misleading generalisations about an event or events in Ancient history in order to draw an analogy, and this starts to grate after a while. Even though you understand that it's the analogy that matters, you wish he had remained faithful to or gave a more accurate rendering of the source material.